The band has a string of questions to answer relating to its short and violent history. Why weren't they charged with wasting police time back in March 1977? Did their former manager Micky Redwall really die after being savaged by his own dogs? Why weren't numerous reports of fans disappearing taken seriously and, most disturbingly, will the family of Peter Miles, a musical associate of the band in their formative years, ever find out the truth about their son's disappearance? Why isn't Bromwich Detection Science's issuing his picture forty years after the event?
Instead of these questions we have women being doorstepped in Milton Keynes and senior citizens being harassed by teenagers, claiming them to be geriatric vamps. As soon as Toten Herzen's reunion was announced this paper predicted the tabloid nonsense that would ensue, but instead of the focus being on the band's lawless image the media picked up one of its favourite hobby horses: writing off the older woman.
My colleague at the Guardian, Jemima Tollet, has already pleaded with the band to emerge, axes shining, and show the media that it's the tabloids who are the dinosaurs, not Toten Herzen. The number of prominent older women in rock can almost be counted on one hand; for every Doro Pesch (b1964) there are hundreds of male rockers approaching their fiftieth year. If Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards can strut their Strats at their age, so can Susan Bekker with a Flying V. If Robert Plant and John Paul Jones can still rock way beyond their retirement pensions, Dee Vincent and Elaine Daley will be more than a match.
Connor Goodman probably didn't realise the irony in his closing statement to the Mail. Old women don't make good rockers. Why then, in his own words, is he still a fan of Elton John?
18 (June)
Rob Wallet's hunch about the maximum distance a vampire can fly on one tank of petrol wasn't exactly answered by the band travelling to New York on an aeroplane out of Heathrow airport. Simply 'turning up' on the pavement outside 550 Madison Avenue was preposterous, but no one said it was impossible. It was a question to be answered some other day. Susan's diary had explained one or two puzzles and misunderstandings, but it had raised other dark issues, notably how, when and why she had turned the others. For now Wallet was waiting for the right moment, an appropriate moment (if such a thing existed), to talk to Dee.
Wallet found the singer to be a mercurial person, always quick to change subjects, fly off at tangents, contradict and question whatever was said. But she had a strangely approachable character that Wallet was drawn to. She was brittle and caustic, but could take it as much as she dished it out and enjoyed it. Wallet didn't have any of the wariness he felt he needed around Elaine and Rene. There was, of course, the risk that she'd turn on you purely out of malevolent glee, but where Susan played the role of vampire queen, Dee was the joker. Knowing her taste for the unusual and obscure he now wondered what she could possibly find interesting in an airport bookstore. She was fluttering from one stand to another, hardly settling long enough to read the titles. Everything was a paperback, recently released or a universally known classic. There were none of the enormous back breaking monstrosities that bent and buckled the shelves of the farmhouse, no sign of any grizzled first editions or moth eaten original copies dug out of book piles in lost European shops.
"I can't decide if Susan is happy in her current form," Wallet said.
Dee spoke as she glanced at the books. "Current form. Is she a racehorse now?"
"Vampire. Undead. . . ."
"You have to admit, they're very unflattering terms. Why not just refer to her as guitarist who looks good for her age. Ah, here he is. Dan Brown. Oh, what that guy doesn't know!"
"That sort of sidesteps the issue."
Dee groaned. "What issue? Get to the fucking point."
"Sorry. I'm getting off the point." Before he could make it Dee had vanished, then her head reappeared in a gap in a James Bond promotional display.
She held up a paperback. "Captain Corelli's Early Prototype ESP Signature Michael Wilton."
"I read her diary," said Wallet.
From behind the display Dee's voice said, "Oh, fuck!" She appeared, leaning against Daniel Craig's cardboard effigy. "If you weren't already dead, you'd be dead. Have you not figured out yet that girl is a walking timebomb?"
"No, it's okay. She left a couple of them in my room. I read the entry from 1974 about how she became a vampire."
"Oh. Yeah, well, we all thought she was going to die when that happened. She did too. I don't think any of us had ever seen someone so ill. It was grotesque."
"She appreciated you all being there for her."
Dee walked away. "Of course she did. Doesn't take an Einstein to understand that." She spotted a copy of The Exorcist. "Ooh, scary projectile vomit. Bleurgh!"
Another browser heard the noise, but didn't see the book. Dee's face appeared through another gap in a pile of cut price bestsellers. "Of course we cared for her, you knobend. We were nice people once." Then her face was gone again.
Wallet followed her. "I'll get to the point."
"Hurray!"
"How did you turn? How did Susan persuade you to go the same way?"
"None of your business," Dee replied. "That's a very personal question. Now, this is more like it. Look Rob. Stella Stevens' new proto-feminist bonkbuster for bored housewives not getting enough: The Stableboy Fucked the Middle Class Idle Rich Woman up the Arse Again." She turned it over to look at the blurb on the back cover. "Must be a sequel." Wallet shook his head. "Look Rob, there's even a picture of the stableboy's hand rubbing her minge."
"It doesn't say that."
"Six ninety-nine. You gonna buy it? Ah!"
Now what? Wallet peered over the top of the stand to see Dee reading intensely the blurb of a paperback that was thicker than most of the others in the shop. Distracted by the opening pages, Dee's head bent forward and her jet black bob hairstyle parted to reveal the eye patched skull tattoo on the back of her neck; underneath the grinning face was the name Morty. So that's why she often called Wallet a pain in the Morty! "Salvatore Scallio's Una Montagne di Dolore. Mm. Buy that." Dee caught Wallet watching her. "What? You thought I was gonna buy The Stableboy. . . ."
"No, no. I've taught myself not to be surprised by anything any more." Well at least one mystery had been solved. This was about as far as he was going to get today, he thought, as he watched her stroll around, book in hand, Morty hanging on at the back there. Then she stopped and without looking up, took a book off the shelves and waved the cover back in Wallet's direction.
"Here's one for you," she said, still immersed in Scallio's Mountain of Sorrow, but holding up Tiger Woods' autobiography. "Should tell you how to correct that wayward swing of yours." She tossed it towards him and headed to the payment counter.
-
Once again Wallet was back on his own, sat on a row of chairs of the departure lounge surrounded by bored travellers with their backpacks and long handled suitcases, walking that slow walk so common at airports and stations, every travel bottleneck where plane, train or boat stands between you and where you really want to be. Rene joined him, settling into the low chair and letting out a slight old man's sigh as artificial as it was subtle. "Having a tough time?" he said.
"Sort of." Wallet fiddled with the strap of his hand luggage.
"Yeah. You're still not exactly flavour of the month. We're having to do everything we thought you were going to do."
"Tell me about it. I tried talking to Dee just now, but she's like a clockwork toy."
Rene agreed. "Try her after she's gorged. She gets a bit drowsy, slows down a little and talks with a bit more sense. Or maybe you could ask her about something she's interested in. She's been stuck with us for so long now and doesn't get a chance to talk to other people much. She can get a little lonely just like anyone, you know."
"I suppose she would, yeah. Which subjects interest her the most?"
Rene smiled. "What does she not like? History, science, politics, philosophy. All the books you see everywhere, she's read them all.
Pick one up, read it, talk to her about it. Show an interest."
"I do try to take an interest, but you've had forty years to get used to all this. I feel intimidated. I think Susan's trying to help me, but, it sounds strange saying this, there's a generation gap. Or it feels like a generation gap. Whatever you are or how you look, you're still older than me, wiser, more experienced. Do you ever stop and think about everything you've done?"
Rene clasped his hands behind his head exasperated. "Rob, thirty five years we've had to think about it."
Stupid question. "Point taken. Susan showed me some places from her life. Took me on a tour around where she lived, the school she went to, places where she played her first gigs. I didn't know you two were in the same class at school. I thought you were a year younger."
"No, just a few months. She was intense even then. It's hard to make people appreciate how tough her life was before she turned. That was the deciding factor for her, I think. That's how she sold it to us; a form of protection, invincibility, strength. It was okay at first, we were a little naive about what was going on around us, but we felt insulated from it all. All the pressure may have crushed some people, but we didn't worry so much. It's only when you find yourself with nothing to do that you start to have second thoughts about it."
"That's what I was trying to ask Dee, how she felt about it all, but she as good as told me to get lost."
"Dee was easy to persuade. I think she's always been a risk taker. Someone who'll try anything once. Put yourself in Susan's position; amongst the four of us who are you going to tell first you've turned into a vampire?"
"You. She knew you the longest. Wouldn't she confide in you?"
"She told me last. I guess she always turned to me last to say, you've heard everybody else, now what do you think? No, you ask the risk taker first, then the easy going one. Then me. See if it kills the others first then ask me!" Rene chuckled and folded his arms. "I was there when Micky Redwall broke the band up." So was Wallet, but he kept the thought to himself. "The other guys, Wim and Marco, changed her mind, but she didn't want to do it. She was determined she would never be in that position again. When she came to me and explained what had happened and what she was, I didn't want to do it at first, I didn't want to change. It scared the shit out of me. I only agreed for two reasons: no one would ever exploit the band, push us around, make us do anything we didn't want to do, we could take it or leave it, no need to worry about starving if things didn't work out; and the second reason was because we both came from families who suffered during the war, who pulled together to get through all the shit that was happening in Rotterdam. We'd never be vulnerable like that. No one would try to destroy us to make a point. We'd be indestructible. When After Sunset split Susan and I promised the other guys we'd do the best we could for them, as much for them as for us and now we could do it, give it everything.
"It was great, that feeling, you know, whatever happened we could just take it or leave it. The headlines and the horror stories, none of it was true, but so what, let them write what they want. Micky was playing the part of the big guy so he was happy. We didn't think he'd take it literally and spread the stories, but he never actually knew the truth."
Micky Redwall must have been as thick as one of his car crushers. "In four years he never found out? He never once saw you near a mirror, never saw you appear and disappear?"
Rene pulled his face. Obviously not. "We took care not to let him know. Maybe he had some thoughts about it. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to believe it. He was a man who made a living out of solid metal and iron, stuff you could feel in your hand, that broke your bones if it hit you hard enough. He formed his own opinion and turned it into a gimmick."
"Susan hated the cover of We Are Toten Herzen."
"We thought he knew something at that point, but then he never asked the question. He'd laugh about it and then go home. It was money; everything he did, every urge was money. Everything was an opportunity and to give him credit he was good at seeing opportunities."
Wallet puffed and shook his head. "He could see everything except the fucking obvious. He had four vampires in front of him and he thought it was an act!" Mind you look at this: two vampires sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, three others loitering somewhere and all these people walking their traveller's slow walk: no one suspects, not one taking sneaky pics of the vampires, nobody passing the time with their vampire detection app; all of them more interested in hearing the life saving announcement to board. And later one of them will be sat next to or in front of or behind a real, physical, solid, in the flesh, no different to your or me fuck-off Vampire. Micky Redwall could almost be forgiven for not noticing. Let's face it, you wouldn't believe it even if one came up and bit you on the neck. "So Lenny Harper must have come out of the blue?" said Wallet.
"For us yes, but. . . ." This looked like an issue still waiting for an explanation. Rene's features knotted together. "We still wonder if Micky saw it coming and let it happen. Another money spinner, more publicity. But, yeah, that was lucky. He was only a few inches away from fucking it all up. And he had four goes to get it right. It really brought everything into focus. Knocked us out of our complacency. We didn't take it seriously, to us it was like being Dutch or vegetarian. We had to step back from everything and ask some serious questions."
Wallet suddenly felt self-conscious. A boy, maybe eight or nine years old, visible through a forest of legs, was staring at them both. He could have been fascinated by Rene being in a dayglo orange tee-shirt, or maybe his ghostly juvenile radar was picking up on something that adults were no longer sensitive too. Rene noticed him and stopped talking. Then stuck his tongue out. The boy looked around for his mother and in a second of uncertainty ambled away.
"The big change came in 1985," Rene continued "when Susan's mother was ill. She was visiting and her father was asking all sorts of questions. You look at your daughter and she's like over forty years old and doesn't look a day over twenty five. Your own daughter's catching you up, but moving further away. Susan told him it was the mountain air in Germany, but you could tell he wasn't convinced. He didn't have the answer, but he wasn't convinced. Susan knew he suspected something, he was there when she was ill in '74. She could never tell him. It's strange how you can't tell the people closest to you. None of us told our families."
"Was that hard?" Wallet hadn't reached that stage yet where people start to notice he wasn't changing. No ageing, no middle aged spread, no male menopause and mid-life crisis. No increasingly agitated partner watching a mental car crash take place with all its debris and bleeding heart analysis.
"Yes. It still is. What you don't need is one of your parents dying. Susan was very close to her mother and they buried her during the day. The questions that emerge at a time like that are the most cruel. Do you keep someone alive or watch them die? I think part of Susan died with her mother that day and my worry is she's trying to turn the clock back. And she never will. Her father's in his nineties now. She hasn't seen him since 1986. Imagine what he'd think if he saw her now?"
Wallet could see her now, waiting for them at the door of the departure lounge, tapping her wrist. She turned heads without effort, Wallet could see men glancing at her even if Susan couldn't, or didn't want to. "We have to go," he said. "Do you regret the change?"
"No, not really. Maybe somehow we can enjoy it again, but it's still early days. And you keep fucking things up." They walked towards their waiting guardian. "I think she wants to complete what we started. We split After Sunset to make Toten Herzen work and I think that's what she intends to do, pay back what we owe to people and then, who knows."
"You boys talking football?" said Susan.
"Sexist comment," said Rene. "Not all of us men like football."
"Oh yeah, I'm forgetting."
"All right, all right. Can I just make it clear I don't actually play golf," said Wallet.
"So what's the board game all about?" And there was just the
hint, the slightest twist of Susan's lips to suggest a smile.
-
There was one last ritual before the band boarded the plane. As the other passengers gathered Susan asked Elaine if she had the stone bag. Wallet whispered to Rene, "What's the stone bag?"
"Watch and learn."
The band stood at a safe distance as Elaine casually stepped up to a middle aged man dressed in a dark business suit, punching out a text message with the stylus of his smartphone. "Excuse me," she asked politely, leaning a shoulder towards him, "Can you just take my bag while I get my passport?"
"Sure," replied the guy as Elaine slid the bag off her shoulder. He was instantly pulled double and dragged to the floor by the weight of the bag, which almost ripped his arms out of the sockets. The bag hit the floor with a dreadful thud. The band creased with laughter, wiping their watering eyes, spluttering and choking. Elaine, without acknowledgement, but with the straightest face in the room, took her passport and boarding pass out of her inside pocket, thanked the guy and lifted the bag back over her shoulder without a hint of strain. Returning to the band she grinned and winked as the business guy rubbed his hands and stared at her with a mixture of embarrassment, confusion and respect.
"What's in the bag?" whispered Wallet.
"About a hundred and fifty kilos," said Susan. "Gets them every time. Oh, if you didn't laugh you'd cry."
19 (June)
A memo had been sent to all staff in the New York office reminding them of 'sunfree afternoon.' Word was already out about Martin Lundqvist's irreversible hearing loss and Jan Moencker's lucky escape and people were eager to find out more about the Europeans responsible. When senior management heard about the potential for an adoring flash mob forming in the corridors of Sony's headquarters another more urgent memo went out to be picked up by email, text, iphone and ipad (both sizes) or photocopied and pinned, glued and blu-tacked onto kitchen and corridor walls. It contained a list of instructions to be followed on the arrival of Toten Herzen.
We Are Toten Herzen (TotenUniverse Book 1) Page 11